Mycelium 2025

Spring 2025

Volume III University of King’s College Halifax

Contents

2

The Birds, The Bees, and The Wandering Uterus: Procreation, Generation, and Medieval Ideas About How Babies Are Made Ana Furtado

9

Alchemical Accessibility and an End to Esotericism Meagan Tremblay

17

The Ambiguity of Modernity, Machines and Americanism in Weimar Germany as Represented in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) Callie Jurmain

26

1950s Aesthetics and Timelessness in Loki Eleanor Friddell

43

The Extended Line as a Template of Truth in Grassmann's Ausdehnunslehre Jane Courtney

54

Know Thy Nature: Odin as the Cultivator of Spirit and Surplus Knowledge James Godsall

65

A Call for Ambiguity: Preciado on Blurring Gender and Form Sophia Taylor

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The Birds, The Bees, and The Wandering Uterus: Procreation, Generation, and Medieval Ideas About How Babies Are Made Ana Furtado ​

Medieval ideas regarding sex and the production of offspring were unsurprisingly

developed on the foundation of Aristotelian-Galenic humoral theory; as was most of Medieval medicine. Humoral theory, or simply humoralism, was a medical system present not only in the Middle Ages, but rather found in Antiquity and progressing as far as the Early Modern period.

Humoralism consisted of the belief that the entirety of the human experience in regards to physical and mental health or disease could be explained by a balance – or imbalance – of four components; blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Each component could be associated with certain qualities and it was the Medieval doctor’s responsibility to find the perfect remedy to balance them. Blood was hot and wet, yellow bile was hot and dry, black bile was cold and dry, and phlegm was cold and wet. A patient suffering from high levels of phlegm, for example, would be prescribed something hot and dry to even out their humors. Humoral theory was used to explain many of the phenomena concerning procreation and generation and to justify ideas regarding the very biological differences of men and women and their respective contributions to offspring in a manner similar to modern explanations – as well as those that seem particularly foreign from a modern lens, such as the wandering uterus.

Humoral theory is able to explain why women menstruate, for example. Women were considered colder and wetter than men and therefore struggled to “dry up the bad and superfluous humors which are in them, nor is their weakness able to tolerate sufficient labor so

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that Nature might expel [the excess] to the outside through sweat as [it does] in men, [therefore] Nature established a certain *purgation especially for women.1” This type of cleansing was menstruation. While we now know that the purpose of a period is not to purge women of humors they are unable to expel, we are also aware that menstruation is in fact a removal of unneeded material; the shedding of the uterine lining when ovulation is not followed by impregnation. Menstruation was also understood to follow a certain rough timeline; they were aware women often had their menarche around the age of thirteen, and that this lasted until women were anywhere from fifty to sixty-five years old – what we now know as menopause. The age range in which menarche and menopause could occur was explained by acknowledging that different women can be wet and cold to different degrees. Furthermore, it was understood that without menstruation there could not be reproduction; “the common people call the menses ‘the flowers,’ because just as trees do not bring forth fruit without flowers, so women without their flowers are cheated of the ability to conceive.2” Not only was menstruation explained by humoral theory, but the ideal state for copulation was as well.

Intercourse that resulted in good embryos and well-formed children was thought to be best had “when the body is in a tempered state with respect to all external influences, that is, it is neither full of food nor totally empty, nor cold nor warm nor dry nor moist, but tempered.3” Sex itself was believed to be good for the balancing of humors – it could reduce anger and particularly

1

“The Salernitan Tradition of Gynecology,” in Medieval Medicine: A Reader, ed. Faith Wallis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), #39, p. 187 2 “The Salernitan Tradition of Gynecology,” in Medieval Medicine: A Reader, ed. Faith Wallis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), #39, p. 187 3 “Medicalizing Sex: Constantine the African,” in Medieval Medicine: A Reader, ed. Faith Wallis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), #104, p. 516

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benefit those with an excess of black bile or phlegm.

Another important discussion in Medieval theories on reproduction revolved around the roles of the male and the female in reproduction and what they each contributed. Giles of Rome, a student of Thomas Aquinas, was a firm believer that women’s ‘sperm’ – what we recognize now as vaginal discharge – was not necessary for reproduction. For Giles, generation required both form, which was provided by the man, and matter, provided by the woman. Both could not equally contribute as there would be double the amount of material needed. Giles’ argument also focused on the idea that, if female ‘sperm’ was important for reproduction, then it would not ‘spew out.’ Of course, Giles’ ideas are flawed as he believed that the female equivalent of ejaculation was vaginal discharge and secretions; when in reality the counterpart of male ejaculation is female ovulation. While a woman can conceive without an orgasm or the release of ‘sperm,’ she cannot conceive without ovulation. We are also aware that men and women do not contribute identically but rather equally to the formation of an embryo, and that the human body circumvents the issue of twice the amount of material by generating germ cells that contain half the amount of genetic material needed for the formation of a fetus. A separate argument Giles makes relies entirely on the testimony of a woman that claims she got pregnant without having sex, blaming “wicked men [that] had ejaculated when they were bathing [in the water of a public bath, and therefore] an emission of sperm on the part of the woman is not necessary, but the sperm of the male suffices as the agent.4” Once again, the idea of generation without copulation is something we now know is impossible. Giles’ ideas were largely founded in Aristotle’s, as he

4

“The Scholastic Quaestio: Aristotle vs. Galen on the Generation of the Embryo” in Medieval Medicine: A Reader, ed. Faith Wallis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), #46, p. 224

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was known to be an avid follower – Aristotle also believed that men and women did not have the same role in conception and that male sperm alone had the power to create a fetus; and that if women and men did in fact contribute equally, there’d be no need for the distinction between sexes. While Aristotle and Galen agree on humoral theory, they diverge on procreation; Galen was aware of the presence of ovaries and saw them as homologous to testes. To him, the existence of ovaries alongside the fact that children would often resemble their mothers was enough proof that women did indeed produce a ‘seed’ that played just as much of an essential role as the male ‘seed.’ Despite debates on the role of women in reproduction, one thing was known – the male sperm was important for reproduction, and therefore so were the testicles. Both these components of reproduction also obeyed the laws of humoralism; the vital power of semen is either tempered or distempered. If the nature of the testicles is warm and humid – that is, tempered – the semen will be tempered. If it is distempered, it is not good for anything. [...] Heat makes semen subtle and watery by dissolving and diffusing it; cold makes semen thick and gross by coagulating and condensing it; dryness reduced semen, while moisture makes it more copious.5 From this passage it can be speculated that ‘distempered’ semen could refer to Medieval knowledge about male infertility, further confirmed by a different passage from the same document that states that some man do not emit any sperm, and “if they emit anything at all, it is not semen, but a watery moisture, and so no conception can take place.6”

5

“Medicalizing Sex: Constantine the African,” in Medieval Medicine: A Reader, ed. Faith Wallis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), #104, p. 513 6 “Medicalizing Sex: Constantine the African,” in Medieval Medicine: A Reader, ed. Faith Wallis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), #104, p. 512

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While the ideas presented so far do not identically represent our modern knowledge of sex and procreation, we can often see that they understood concepts of human reproduction that we understand today as well; just with outdated explanations for these phenomena. They understood menstruation, menarche, infertility, the fact that the female orgasm is not needed for reproduction; and, while some did not agree, many did in fact argue that women had an equal role in conception. Furthermore, social concepts regarding childbirth and virginity were also present; in regards to childbirth, it was understood that this was an exhausting process for a woman and they were instructed to rest for about eight or nine days after birth. Books such as the trotula describe the tearing of the perineum, the skin separating the vulva from the anus, which is still a common complication of childbirth, as well as how to treat it and prevent it; for there are some women in whom the vagina and the anus become one opening and the same pathway. Whence in these women the womb comes out and hardens.

We give aid to such women by repositioning [the womb]. [...] In [subsequent] birth we should aid them thus. Let a cloth be prepared in the shape of an oblong ball and place it in the anus, so that in each effort of pushing out the child, it is present into the anus firmly so that there not be [another] *solution of continuity of this kind7 Furthermore, we see the presence of instructions on how to create a “constrictive for the vagina so that they may appear as if they were virgins,8” which can be read as a predecessor to the infamous ‘husband stitch.’ On virginity, the trotula describes the existence of “dirty and corrupt prostitutes who desire to seem to be more than virgins,9” that is, women that did not wait until

7

“The Salernitan Tradition of Gynecology,” in Medieval Medicine: A Reader, ed. Faith Wallis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), #39, pp. 189-190 8 “The Salernitan Tradition of Gynecology,” in Medieval Medicine: A Reader, ed. Faith Wallis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), #39, p. 190 9 “The Salernitan Tradition of Gynecology,” in Medieval Medicine: A Reader, ed. Faith Wallis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), #39, p. 190

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marriage to have sex. The use of crude language to describe these women is a reflection of the Christian ideals that were intertwined in Medieval culture and medicine, but nonetheless, instructions on how to deceive a man into believing a woman has an intact hymen are described in the text. While many use powdered natron, the author does not believe that this is the best way to go about this and suggests the use of leeches in the vagina the night before marriage to create a blood clot. One medieval idea that seems to have no place in modern medicine or culture, on the other hand, is the suffocation of the womb or the wandering uterus – believed to often happen to women that did not have sex, either due to the death of their husbands or simply due to the fact that they were still virgins. Hippocratic texts described that if the uterus dried out and desperately craved wet humors, it could move inside of the body and attach itself to the liver, which could choke a woman or cause fainting. Post-Hippocratic texts deny that the uterus can physically move inside the body but continue to believe that it could somehow suffocate a woman from the inside; and that the best way to treat this was to attempt to provoke menstruation. ​

While we are not to judge Medieval medicine through modern standards, it is impossible

as individuals that live in the present to not connect past knowledge with current knowledge, especially when involving biological phenomena happening at the cellular level such as ovulation and implantation. Many of the ideas presented and the theories believed by Medieval doctors and scholars have similarities to what we know now about procreation – the idea of male and female seeds that are equally as important but do not equally contribute to a fetus, for example, directly parallels our knowledge of eggs and sperm; the idea of menstruation as a type of purge of unneeded material is also not very far off from the reality of it. Furthermore, the attempts to not

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only treat the rupture of the perineum but to also prevent it from happening in following births showcases important knowledge of the impact of childbirth on a woman’s body as well as the Medieval tendency to focus on prevention. While the belief that a woman could get pregnant from a public bath or that an uterus could move throughout the body and attach to the liver are quite strange from our modern perspective, much of Medieval knowledge about sex and reproduction seems to more accurately relate to our current knowledge of these biological processes in comparison to Medieval medicine’s understanding of other conditions such as leprosy and the plague.

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Alchemical Accessibility and an End to Esotericism Meagan Tremblay ​

In its original conception, alchemy was understood as a secret art, an inherently

religious or spiritual practice. The alleged works of the prophet Hermes Trismegistus, a godly being who represents a combination of the gods Hermes and Thoth, emphasizes the importance of gnosis to the alchemical process, in which the alchemist in question undergoes an equivalent change to the element that is being alchemically altered. In this we can see that historically alchemy has been the result of marrying the two modern concepts of spirituality and chemistry.

The ancients did not consider it to be a divided concept, but as the scientific revolution and the printing press rose to prominence in Europe, attitudes around knowledge, which included chemical knowledge, shifted. With the easier distribution allotted by the printing press and the growing public interest in the natural sciences, it is thought that alchemy naturally branched into the two different paths of pure science and spirituality. This more spiritualised element of alchemy, characterized by its esoteric set dressing to disguise an inner chemical knowledge, persists in the seventeenth century in The Twelve Keys by Basil Valentine, in which these alchemical procedures for creating colloidal gold are hidden in visual ciphers with both chemical and spiritual implications. The opposing stream is showcased in Marie de Meudrac’s piece La Chymie Charitable et Facile, in which Meurdrac very directly explicates various chemical processes that would serve useful to her audience of noblewomen, such as beauty or household products. Valentine and Meurdrac’s texts, both published within a century of one another, encapsulate the two opposing directions in which alchemy is lead in the seventeenth

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century, one which eschews the former esoteric set dressing around alchemical practices and grounds its works in accessibility and usefulness of the general populous, and another which remains the original intent of keeping this chemical knowledge only accessible to learned adepts. The two practitioners' works clearly explicate the debate of values occurring in the practice of alchemy at the time. ​

The name Basil Valentine is likely not in reference to a real practitioner by that title, as

it was potentially the claimed author of a compiled works by a Benedictine monk, who said he found and edited the works rather than authored them. This monk, Johann Thoelde, was involved in the production of mineral salts, making his authoring of the texts sensible enough.

Various other works were attributed to Valentine or purportedly authored by him, making the authorship of these various texts more and more complex (Principe, “The Development of the Basil Valentine Corpus and Biography”). Valentine’s text The Twelve Keys solely concerns the transformation of metals, and it communicates this process with a combination of strange images steeped in alchemical allegory with similarly themed textual passages. It was originally published with just the texts, woodcut images were added later (Principe, “The Development of the Basil Valentine Corpus and Biography”, 2), both clarifying and further mystifying the text.

In the First Key, the process of ‘purifying’ the gold is detailed: If you would operate by means of our bodies, take a fierce grey wolf...he roams and is savage with hunger. Cast him to the body of the King, and when he has devoured it, burn him entirely to ashes in a great fire. By this process the King will be liberated ; and when it has been performed thrice the Lion has overcome the wolf..thus our body has been rendered fit for the first stage of our work” (Basil Valentine, The Twelve Keys, 1).

The elements of this alchemical process are not completely hidden from the unlearned reader,

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one can realize that some substance must be burned or heated somehow to remove impurities, but the names of the metals and the exact processes required for the recipe are disguised.

Alternate names are used for the metals, with antimony continually and only referred to as the wolf, and gold as the King or Apollo. These tie into older alchemical understandings, with the gold association with the sun and the King of the Heavens, and antimony with its similarities to lead being tied to Saturn. Only a reader with preexisting knowledge of these associations would be able to comprehend the procedures in this text. No amounts are specified, and particular procedures are left up to the discretion of the aspiring practitioner. A reader would have to possess some preexisting alchemical knowledge in order to make use of this text chemically, as it is shown to be chemically decipherable, but the initiatory knowledge that covers it complicates the understanding. Valentine’s audience are those who are already initiated into the alchemical community, or the literate, highly educated class who would either have the necessary esoteric background from initiation or from study. The knowledge of alchemy in Valentine is not something that is seen as a public good in need of being shared, but a secret knowledge that should only be accessible to those with this preexisting alchemical understanding. ​

Meurdrac’s La Chymie Charitable et Facile lists many different recipes for the benefit

of her readers, all in her own vernacular French, and specifically written with the intent of inexperienced chemists, i.e the noblewomen who are the target audience of her writings, to attain this previously completely hidden knowledge. In the beginning of her work she states “I have done my best to explain myself clearly and to make the operations accessible. I do not

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wish to surpass my understanding” (Meurdrac, Easy and Accessible Chemistry, 2). She sets out on sharing this knowledge because she perceives that sharing her chemical knowledge in the most straightforward manner possible will bring benefits to many, especially those who could not previously access it. Women experienced many barriers to access learned knowledge in Meurdrac’s lifetime, alchemical or otherwise. Since Latin was taught in schools and women were not often attending schools or permitted to be part of the learned class, the ability to even read these sources was extremely limited. Despite this, books of family remedies became more common in the sixteenth century, as the paper “Prescriptions for Women” by Meredith Ray states: “such activity [the collecting and compiling of recipes] by women was not uncommon...’the collecting of family remedies seems to have turned into a veritable feminine genre of publication’ beginning in the sixteenth century” (Ray, “Prescriptions for Women”, 4).

Women were showing a growing interest in this expanding chemical knowledge through these collections, and were creating their own compendiums in order to write down and pass on these procedures, Ray states “These works were, as Eamon notes, fundamentally utilitarian in nature - interested, that is, not in the theoretical underpinnings of ‘secret’ knowledge they purported to reveal, but rather in its practical application to daily life” (Ray, 6). Her works also discuss something commonly overlooked, the dangers of certain substances being applied to the body, and specifically warns women against putting mercury in products to be used on the body. Her work is entirely didactic and exists only for its utility, and for Meurdrac to share the knowledge she has acquired in a way that is easy and accessible to others (hence the title of her work). In her piece she reiterates that women have equal ability in mind to men, just that they lack the

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opportunity to use or showcase it (Meurdrac 1). Her work is firmly within this literary and scientific movement in which chemical procedures are being shared with previously unwelcome audiences of laymen, who are not considering any layers of mysterious alchemical secrecy, but only have interest in exacting detail of procedure and its reasonable applications to their own lives. The story of the inner transformation of the adept is gone, and the trappings of mysticality and secrecy are absent, leaving us with something that much more closely resembles a chemical tradition we can recognise today. Meurdrac’s texts as a whole represent a microcosm of one end of the alchemical spectrum, (ironically very suited to alchemical tradition). Her compiling, publication, and complete openness about her procedures, even offering for her readers to contact her personally with their thoughts (Meurdrac 1), is a complete rejection of how alchemy was historically presented. ​

Both these authors offer a description of the ‘alchemical baths’ needed in their

procedures, albeit for different purposes (one for distillation, one for the extraction of the philosopher’s stone). Meurdrac’s work describes the baths in a straightforward manner, with some spiritual allusions on her work in general, but none that muddy the ideas that she is trying to get across to her readership: “for this operation we must take the leaves and flowers of the aromatic that we wish to distill, and if they are fresh, fill up the alembic four fingers from the mouth; if they are dried, we must leave six fingers” (Meurdrac, 4). Basil Valentine’s baths are almost entirely allegorised: they are referred to as the pre-marital rites of the King and the Queen; i.e. mercury and silver mixture as the Queen’s bath, and the combination of the ‘dragon’ (saltpeter) and the ‘eagle’ (ammonium chloride), given these names because of the

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locations in which they are found. In the paper “Some Issues with the Historiography of Alchemy” by Lawrence Principe and William Newman, the usage of this extensive esoteric imagery is discussed as follows: The secrecy and “initiatic style” ubiquitous in works on transmutation led quite naturally to a tone of mystery absent from the later, more “open” writings of eighteenth-century chemistry. The emphasis on secrecy led originally to the fairly common contemporaneous invocation of morality or divine agency as “gatekeepers” to secret knowledge (Larence Principe and Newman, “Some Issues with the Historiography of Alchemy, 13).

They observe that the tone of these more mystified alchemical works, such as Valentine’s in the seventeenth century, have an underlying idea that the earlier alchemists are keeping the knowledge to themselves and fellow initiates, due to the idea that this alchemical knowledge is somehow sacred in nature. The text creates an outer facade in order to keep the uninitiated out, which makes sense if the practitioner either has the idea that this knowledge is sacred and should be reserved for those with sacred standing, or that the uninitiated do not deserve access to this knowledge because of their status. Valentine states at the end of his text: “I do not here speak according to the customary manner of the Sages. But I must not speak too openly about how the inner gates are to be unlocked...if you discover this, you are in possession of the secret, and can practice the art.” (Valentine 7). Valentine claims that his text is written in a more comprehensible manner than that of the older texts in his tradition, but that the secret of alchemy should still be encoded in this esoteric language, and the secrets of alchemy are to be kept to those who are worthy enough to uncover its secrets underneath all the esoteric set dressing. Meurdrac functions in complete opposition, stating in her text “This work is useful...many secrets beneficial to women, not only for conserving but also improving the

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advantages they have received from Nature...I also asks this favour of those who wish to undertake this work that they distribute these remedies generously” (Meurdrac 1). Rather than encouraging her students to keep this alchemical knowledge to themselves, she treats alchemy as a shared public good that should be accessible to all, no matter their sex, class, or education. ​

Alchemy as we know it from history no longer exists, as it has now split into the two

recognisable modern streams of chemistry and occultism. It is important to remember that this was not always the case, with the two inextricably tied up for most of time. It is only when science and chemistry became more accessible to the rest of the world outside this initiated elite that we see the two ways that historical alchemy branches off; one as the recognisable clear modern chemistry, the other with chemistry intact but remaining hidden under its esoteric coverings to keep out the unlearned reader. Over time, the esotericism of the alchemical craft is lost to history, leaving us with only the chemistry of modern science we know today.

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Works Cited Basil Valentine. The Twelve Keys. In Waite, A.E. (ed). The Hermetic Museum (London 1893; reprint Sameul Weiser 1990). Accessed via Brightspace.

Principe, Lawrence M. “The Development of the Basil Valentine Corpus and Biograph: Pseudepigraphic Corpora and Paracelsian Ideas.” Early Science and Medicine, vol. 24, no. 5/6, 2019, pp. 549–72.

Meurdrac, Marie. La Chymie Charitable et Facile. 1656, trans. Kyle Fraser, 2022. Accessed via Brightspace.

Ray, Meredith “Prescriptions for Women: Alchemy, Medicine and the Renaissance Querelle Des Femmes”. Accessed via Brightspace.

Principe, Lawrence and William Newman. “Some Issues with the Historiography of Alchemy”.

Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, edited by William Newman and Anthony Grafton, MIT Press, 2001, pp.385-420

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The Ambiguity of Modernity, Machines and Americanism in Weimar Germany as Represented in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) Callie Jurmain Germany in the 1920s was marked by an intense period of change as the nation transitioned from a constitutional monarchy to a democratic republic. This post-war period was defined by cultural transitions, especially as the ambivalent perception of machines and modernity came to a head. The technological innovations of World War I such as tanks and chemical weapons made possible unprecedented levels of violence. Germany, still reeling from the loss of the Great War, felt these consequences firsthand. Modernity through technology was met with skepticism and contempt but also hope, and the United States embodied these ideals.

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was created amid these conversations. His film shows significant influences from American ideologies of Taylorism and Fordism. The film intentionally displays the consequences of misusing these ideals, and how their improper application harmed Germans. The film then gestures towards Taylor’s intended presentation of scientific management as the solution to the oppressive, alienated work those in the under-city experience.

The Weimar period arrived with German society experiencing the shocking devastation caused by technological innovations developed during the war combined with the subsequent collapse of their economy as a result of the Treaty of Versailles. Anton Kaes quotes an unnamed German intellectual looking back in 1930: “the glorious discipline of technology appeared only in the form of tanks, mines, poison gas, for the purpose of annihilating

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humankind.”10 While technology’s proven destructive force appeared through the war, it also was the liberator from Germany’s economic despair. Modernism and industrialization alleviated the burden of massive inflation. By the end of the 1920s, modernization enabled important industries (ie, chemical, electrical and machine-tool industries) to compete successfully in the world markets.11 Modernization was synonymous with America, and ideas of rationalization described by Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford were particularly influential in Weimar Germany. Rationalization was the utilization of science to create maximum output with minimum labour.12 Taylor’s “scientific management” meant reorganizing factory production to reach optimal levels of productivity using techniques of surveillance and employing management and engineering experts to achieve it. Fordism applied these concepts of optimization to the entire productive process and implemented the assembly line.13 These ideas are reflected in Metropolis, where men are depicted moving mechanically through low-skill labour tasks.

Rationalization gained popularity in Weimar Germany where economic recovery relied heavily on Taylor and Ford’s ideas; a recovery made possible through the “adoption of modern (American) production methods; ‘rationalization became the great slogan of the 1920s.’”14 Ford’s autobiography was a massive success in Germany, with 200 000 copies sold in the

10

Anton Kaes, “Metropolis: City, Cinema, Modernity,” in Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy, ed. T.O. Benson (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1993), 6 11 Eric D Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007). 149.

12 Weitz, Promise, 149.

13 Charles S. Maier, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the 1920s,” Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 2 (1970): 55.

14 Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History 1918-1933 (New York: Perigee Books, 1974): 22.

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1920s.15 By the late 1920s, Germany emerged as an industrialized society with the industrial sector employing twice as many workers as agriculture (from a roughly equivalent level at the turn of the century) and both trade and transport rose even faster.16 Yet this rapid economic modernization fuelled by the application of ‘rationalization’ was not accompanied by the promised economic prosperity for all in a manner that would benefit the broad mass of workers. Metropolis provides a more accurate demonstration of how prosperity was distributed, through its under-city, showing the consequences of unchecked rationalization. Rationalization in Germany meant “a faster pace of work and longer industrial hours [which] resulted in more industrial accidents, sometimes of the most serious nature, causing amputations, damaged lungs, and scalding burns. Industrial labour remained long, hard and dirty, and now became more intense and dangerous.”17 A 1928 compilation of women’s working lives in textile factories revealed further similarities to the plight of the workers in Metropolis. They described their lives as a “monotonous routine governed by the alarm clock, factory whistle, the clang of the machinery in the textile factories, and endless household labour.”18 Metropolis mirrors these reports and their experience of grinding 10-hour shifts relieved only by the whistle signalling its end.19 The film shares further comparisons to the realities of factory life. Women described being on their feet all day or having to bend awkwardly to access the machines, similar to the

15

Günter Berghaus, “Girlkultur: Feminism, Americanism, and Popular Entertainment in Weimar Germany,” Journal of Design History 1, No. 3/4 (1988): 208.

16 Laqueur, Cultural, 24.

17 Weitz, Promise, 153.

18 Weitz, Promise, 153.

19 Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang (UFA, 1927), 48:07. https://www.kanopy.com/en/dal/watch/video/114333

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unnamed worker Freder saw collapse at the start of the film, causing an accident.20 One woman stated, “You leave the factory feeling worked to death and completely exhausted”21 reminiscent of the opening scene of the film where the exhausted workers shuffle home after their shifts.22 Modernity, and its accompanying technology and industry, became a topic of intense debate. To many, “most of the evils of modernity had originated in the United States…America stood for technological progress, but it also symbolized in many eyes the absence of culture, soulless materialism, the new barbarism.” There the growing importance of technology was met with contempt, with some calling it “the Americanization of German life.”23 German rationalization was described by the German communist Party as “American factory and exploitation methods, American profits, but no American wages, only German hunger wages.”

24

When Lang projected these criticisms in Metropolis, he depicted a future in which there is

ruthless exploitation of workers, alienated completely from their labour without access to the upper city. They saw no benefits from their labour as they lived a life segregated from the progress and modernity above, while exhausting their bodies in their thankless contribution to improving the quality of other people’s lives. This loss of autonomy entailed a loss of culture, in Germany, and “some expressed horror at the effects of mass culture…They were afraid of a kind of progress which they thought would inevitably lead to a technocratic dictatorship, and ultimately to wholesale destruction”25 The ending of Metropolis presents Lang’s idea of a

20

Metropolis, 15:09.

Weitz, Promise, 153.

22 Metropolis, 04:22.

23 Laqueur, Cultural, 32.

24 Weitz, Promise, 153.

25 Laqueur, Cultural, 32.

21

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solution, mediating these different views towards technology and progress.

The problems in Metropolis stem from a perverted implementation of Taylor’s scientific management. Taylorism in its ideal form aims to resolve class antagonism through a union between the managers and workers. He states that “Scientific management…has for its very foundation the firm conviction that the true interests of the two [employers and employees] are one and the same…it is possible to give the workman what he most wants--high wages--and the employer what he wants--a low labor cost--for his manufactures.”26 Indeed it seems in Metropolis that a purely exploitative relationship between the classes is bound to fail, but the resolution is not to overthrow the ruling class but rather to work together in harmony.

These ideals of scientific management found success in Weimar Germany across party lines, from Communist, Socialist, Liberal and Fascists alike.27 For example, Socialist Max Cohen, member of Sozialistische Monatshefte, advocated to the Second Congress of Räte delegates in April 1919 and the SPD Congress in Weimar in June for a Tayloristic approach to labour. He proposed a Labour Chamber as an upper house of the new Parliament that would include “professional men, entrepreneurs, and labour representatives [who] would co-operate to safeguard production and ward off rash nationalization projects.”28 Cohen saw socialism as a way to increase productivity which required a partnership between these groups which would eliminate the need for worker control.29 The language of seeking harmony is reminiscent of the end of Metropolis, with the historical context that Lang would have had towards Taylorism. He could have been inspired by its promises and viewed it as a way out of

26

Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Dover Publications, 1998). 4.

Berghaus, “Girlkultur,” 208.

28 Maier, “Taylorism,” 49.

29 Maier, “Taylorism,” 49.

27

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technological ruin and exploitation: Taylor's application of engineering to labour relations and his idea of technology as a social arbiter which reduced class confrontation and social division were complemented by Ford's theories of egalitarian capitalism based on mass consumption. His reorganization of the entire production process introduction of assembly line, use of an incentive system based on piece-wages, etc.--led to an enhanced productivity and expanding output, the profits of which were shared by both investors and workers.30 In Germany, ‘rationalization’ vis a vis Taylorism and Fordism was central to reducing opposition towards technology and helped to bring about Germany’s “New Machine Age.”31 ‘Rationalization’ or scientific management does not solve the other problem presented in Metropolis, the loss of culture. Metropolis reflected many of the criticisms towards technology, like those presented by German academic George Steinhausen in 1929 who saw the latest developments in Weimar Germany as almost entirely negative; viewing its legacy as a “general cultural decline” and its only real contribution to society as “sports and technology.”32 The society presented in Metropolis mimicked these criticisms; viewers are never shown that there is a religion, other than industry, or in Freder’s hallucinations. Instead, the viewer is shown activity for activity’s sake in the city. Freder idles in an Edenic garden, entertained by various women, and participates in sport for fun.33 At the end of Metropolis, Lang suggests a solution to this gap of culture. He alludes to a more democratic situation of power, rather than a concentration of power in the hands of one man, Joh Fredersen. This was a direction that the Republic attempted with its new Weimar constitution, intended to be both

30

Berghaus, “Girlkultur,” 208.

Berghaus, “Girlkultur,” 208.

32 Laqueur, Cultural, 36.

33 Metropolis: 07:20.

31

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“modern and to embody the spirit of the nineteenth-century German democratic tradition...It struck a note of compromise, not always successfully, between conflicting social, religious and regional interests.”34 This attempt at ideal governance, rooted in tradition, was embodied

by Maria and Freder’s coming together before the union of Frederson and the head worker.35 Historian Ludmilla Jordanova highlighted some of the inaccuracies in Lang’s representation of scientific management in Metropolis. She argued it captured both “the subservience of people to the work process and the tyranny of time — and exaggerated them, as in a caricature, to heighten the viewer's sense of industrial inhumanity.” However, Jordanova noted the absence of two central features important to scientific management: firstly, management itself and the technical experts and, secondly, fair wages. She stated that “the reasoning behind this was perfectly plain — higher incomes undermined class solidarity, enhanced social mobility, and through the power to consume that better incomes offered, drew working people into a middle-class lifestyle. In theory at least the lure of moving into the professional and managerial classes would undermine any possible discontents.”36 While it is true that Lang misses these key pillars in Taylorist ideology, Metropolis depicts a view of the applied ideology from workers’ own accounts of their experiences with this ideology during the Weimar period. Before the end of the film there was no mediator between employer and employee and the work the employees did was purely exploitative.

Lang did not view an abandonment of technology as the solution, as it could have catastrophic 34

Laqueur, Cultural, 11.

Metropolis: 2:25:37.

36 Ludmilla Jordanova, “Science, Machines, and Gender,” in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear, ed. M. Minden and H. Bachmann, (New York: Camden House, 2000), 181.

35

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results like the flooding of the undercity. Instead, his solution involved a Tayloristic style mediation of worker to the employer with a middleman (Freder) to attempt to illustrate the potential rationalism has to create a more equitable situation under capitalism. Whether this was a utopian ideal or real possibility remained unanswered in the film, but Lang later identified it as a “fairy tale-definitely.”37 Metropolis embodied Weimar Germany, as it strove to establish a path to its future success, one with intense modernization but afraid of its potential and attached to tradition. In his consideration of the ideal government, Fritz Lang attempted to answer these questions with the hope of reconciliation.

37

Kaes, Cinema, 3.

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Bibliography Berghaus, Günter. “Girlkultur: Feminism, Americanism, and Popular Entertainment in Weimar Germany.” Journal of Design History 1, no. 3/4 (1988): 193-219.

Jordanova, Ludmilla. “Science, Machines, and Gender.” In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear. Edited by Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann, pp. 181-95. New York: Camden House, 2000.

Kaes, Anton. “Metropolis: City, Cinema, Modernity.” In Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy. Edited by Timothy O. Benson, pp. 146-165. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1993.

Lang, Fritz, dir. Metropolis. 1927; Germany: UFA. Laqueur, Walter. Weimar: A Cultural History 1918-1933. New York: Perigee Books, 1974.

Maier, Charles. S. “Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the 1920s.” Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 2, (1970): 27-61.

Taylor, Frederick W. The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Dover Publications, 1998.

Weitz, Eric. D. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007.

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1950s Aesthetics and Timelessness in Loki Eleanor Friddell The television show Loki, released between 2021 and 2023, chronicles the proliferation of a multiplicity of timelines in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as set in motion by the heroics of fan-favourite character Loki. Throughout both seasons, the plot of Loki is overshadowed by a powerful bureaucratic agency existing outside of time and tasked with protecting its proper flow: the Time Variance Authority, or TVA. This seemingly omnipotent organization becomes Loki’s primary enemy as he fights to free both himself and the burgeoning multiverse from their control. Loki incorporates elements from many genres, primarily science fiction and fantasy films, action thrillers and detective dramas, none of which explain why its production design consistently and intentionally employs 1950s aesthetics in association with the TVA. To start, an investigation into the philosophy of time travel media, as well as the cultural narratives surrounding midcentury design, sheds some light onto this unlikely design choice. Scholarship on time travel by Angela Dimitrakaki and Miltos Tsiantis provides some context as to how science fiction films use time travel narratives in order to challenge the control over time exerted by real-world capitalistic forces. Additionally, an exploration of the of the work of interior designer T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings reveals an intentionality behind the perceived timelessness of midcentury design. Brutalist architecture is also briefly discussed, contextualizing the popular association of this visual style with alienation and control. Then, having laid the groundwork for the connection between the timelessness of the TVA and 1950s aesthetics, an analysis of the particular visual vocabulary of Loki can begin. For example, TVA

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propaganda materials and technology use 1950s aesthetics to directly communicate the organization’s authoritarian nature. The architecture of the TVA itself employs a pastiche of midcentury design principles and references in order to make it seem futuristic and dated at once, setting it apart from any particular artistic movement and making explicit the inseparability of the TVA from temporal domination. Moreover, its retro aesthetic is so idealized as to be ahistorical, representing the current cultural memory of the 1950s more than the reality of the era, a fact which itself supports the show’s presentation of the TVA as the archetypal sinister bureaucracy. Therefore, through the use of idealized 1950s aesthetics, Loki not only visually signals the timelessness of the TVA, but it also demonstrates the necessity of replacing its eternal status quo with a freer, more fluid timeline.

Time travel narratives inherently involve conflicts between temporal stability and chaos, reflecting discussions about freedom or the lack thereof in society at large. Angela Dimitrakaki and Miltos Tsiantis address this in their article “Terminators, Monkeys and Mass Culture: The carnival of time in science fiction films,” wherein they argue that “the current fascination with the time travel motif can be understood in terms of an oppositional cultural narrative running counter to dominant forms of temporality within capitalism.”38 Dimitrakaki and Tsiantis posit that capitalistic forces impose “temporal norms” onto society, replacing “natural rhythms” with "the rhythm of commodity production and consumption,” while forcing the population to comply via the power of the state.39 In this type of environment, time does not exist in its natural form,

38

Angela Dimitrakaki and Miltos Tsiantis, “Terminators, Monkeys and Mass Culture: The carnival of time in science fiction films,” Time & Society vol. 11 (2002): p. 209. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.dal.ca/10.1177/0961463X02011002003.

39 Angela Dimitrakaki and Miltos Tsiantis, “Terminators, Monkeys and Mass Culture,” p. 213.

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whatever that may be. Instead, time is regimented, tightly controlled, forced to be linear and purely deterministic, with no space for freedom or chaos to emerge. Such a static model of time could even be seen as timeless, a sort of eternal present with no meaningful future. Consequently, Dimitrakaki and Tsiantis suggest that time travel narratives challenge this conception of time by returning control to the temporally disenfranchised, as “…the potentially subversive element of time travel films lies precisely in a particular conceptualization and experience of time and history as cyclical and in flux.”40 Viewing time as chaotic and ever-changing rather than static and deterministic suggests the “reversibility of events and ambivalence of the final outcome,” allowing “the possibility of transformation.”41 In this way time travel destabilizes the temporal status quo, allowing changes to be made to the past, present and future with potentially enormous effects as said changes ripple throughout the timeline. Thus, in a science fiction universe in which time travel is possible, preventing this kind of destabilization would be key for any organization which seeks to enforce a static universal order. It is the ensuing conflict between timelessness and temporal chaos which motivates the plot-line of Loki, and which makes the use of design elements that visually convey this temporal subject matter to the audience thematically appropriate.

Next, it is necessary to understand what makes 1950s aesthetics so effective at communicating “timelessness” to the audience of a modern science fiction programme. One reason for this arises from the original designers themselves, some of whom purposefully set out to create timeless visual styles. For example, influential midcentury American interior designer T.

40 41

Angela Dimitrakaki and Miltos Tsiantis, “Terminators, Monkeys and Mass Culture,” p. 209.

Angela Dimitrakaki and Miltos Tsiantis, “Terminators, Monkeys and Mass Culture,” p. 218.

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H. Robsjohn-Gibbings referred to his classics-infused design philosophy as sans époque, meaning “timeless” in French.42 In this way Robsjohn-Gibbings exemplified the modernist desire to erase the ornate complications of nineteenth century European and American design in favour of a simple, elegant style that could stand the test of time. His ideal source for this simplicity was Ancient Greece, as he believed that “the ‘timeless,’ universal appeal of classical Greek furniture stood out as something of both aesthetic merit and greater truth… For him, a connection to the classical world imbued his work with a lasting beauty that was at once modern and impervious to fashion.”43 The periodic return to classical antiquity for design inspiration is a common thread linking many European art movements, such as the Renaissance and Neoclassicism, perhaps creating a sense of timeless elegance and continuity across historical eras which Robsjohn-Gibbings sought to access. Visually, this classics-oriented design philosophy resulted in features such as slanted and tapered table and chair legs, an emphasis on natural materials and geometric furniture silhouettes, a revival of classical elements like mosaics and intricately carved decorative statuary, and low, wide furniture reminiscent of Ancient Greek klismos chairs.44 Interestingly, Robsjohn-Gibbings became disaffected with the anonymity of modernist aesthetics in the mid-1950s, as he “had concluded that the generic quality of mid-century modernism was doomed to create this sense of alienation in people.”45 The timelessness and simplicity of design that he championed had, ironically, gone too far, leading to isolation and disaffection instead of elegance and liberation.

42

James Buresh, “T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings: Timeless Mid-Century Modern Design,” Archives of American Art Journal vol. 48, no. 1/2 (Spring 2009): p. 32. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40649414.

43 James Buresh, “T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings,” p. 32.

44 James Buresh, “T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings,” p. 37-39.

45 James Buresh, “T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings,” p. 41.

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This souring of perception is palpable in the reception of other midcentury architectural movements as well, such as Brutalism. A prototypical example of American Brutalist architecture is the Breuer building, designed by Marcel Breuer in order to house the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.46 The Breuer building is large and imposing, likened in shape to an “inverted ziggurat”, with its uniform grey granite exterior and bulky shape setting it dramatically apart from the surrounding neighbourhood.47 Breuer created it with the optimistic intention of representing “a new epoch in the history of man, the realization of one of his oldest ambitions: the defeat of gravity,” through the “heavy lightness” of the structure.48 However, the design of the Breuer building can also be interpreted as oppressive, since it takes the form of an enormous block of grey stone only connected to the adjoining sidewalk by a single concrete bridge, having only a few trapezoidal windows that jut out at strange angles, and whose interior layout was intended to carefully control the flow of visitors through the museum.49 Even less hospitable are Brutalist government buildings like the Boston City Hall, an enormous concrete edifice seemingly perched on massive stilts, whose generally regular surface of rectangular windows is interrupted occasionally by large blocky outcroppings.50 Although architects and critics praised its innovative design and “monumentality” at the time of its construction, it was remarkably unpopular with the public, generally considered to be quite ugly.51 Even though at its

46

Barry Bergdoll, “Marcel Breuer: Bauhaus Tradition, Brutalist Invention,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (Summer 2016), p. 33. https://www.metmuseum.org/met-publications/marcel-breuer-bauhaus-tradition-brutalist-invention. See https://whitney.org/about/breuer-building for pictures of the Breuer building.

47 Barry Bergdoll, “Marcel Breuer: Bauhaus Tradition, Brutalist Invention,” p. 35.

48 Barry Bergdoll, “Marcel Breuer: Bauhaus Tradition, Brutalist Invention,” p. 33, 35.

49 Barry Bergdoll, “Marcel Breuer: Bauhaus Tradition, Brutalist Invention,” p. 35-37.

50 Tom Acitelli, “Boston City Hall Turns 50,” Curbed Boston, Vox Media, January 7, 2019. https://boston.curbed.com/2019/1/7/18168336/boston-city-hall-turns-50-2019.

51 Tom Acitelli, “Boston City Hall Turns 50.”

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inception Brutalism focused on raw materials and a utopian ideal of interrelated social living, through being adopted by powerful institutions it grew over time to be synonymous in the public consciousness with the oppressive power of either capitalism or communism, as well as the state.

52

It is quite understandable that passersby would feel intimidated by buildings as immense and

uninviting as the Breuer building and Boston City Hall, to say nothing of the spectre of Soviet architecture hanging over the American psyche at the time. Towering over and subsuming the individual, this style of modernist construction emerged alongside the postwar paradigm of the seemingly eternal bureaucratic government agency, only confirming the alienation lamented by Robsjohn-Gibbings. Thus an association between midcentury aesthetics and timelessness, impersonality, and bureaucracy is historically grounded. ​

All three of these characteristics feature strongly in Loki, not only thematically but

visually, as the vast majority of the show takes place within the anonymous, labyrinthine halls of the TVA’s eternal headquarters. In the first episode, the audience learns that time in the Marvel Cinematic Universe takes the form of a single, linear timeline known as the “Sacred Timeline”, with no possibility of alternate universes, branches, loops or any other temporal irregularities; the apparent necessity of this structure is explained as an integral part of the TVA’s founding myth.53 Loki begins with the eponymous Loki being arrested by the TVA for the crime of creating a branch in the timeline, and this myth is delivered to him via a retro-style hand-drawn animated cartoon, narrated by the TVA’s mascot and virtual assistant Miss Minutes.54 According to her,

52

Dirk van den Heuvel, “Between brutalists: The Banham hypothesis and the Smithson way of life,” The Journal of Architecture vol. 20, no. 2 (2015): p. 295, 300-301. https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2015.1027721.

53 Loki, season 1, episode 1, “Glorious Purpose,” directed by Kate Herron, written by Michael Waldron, released June 9, 2021 on Disney+, streamed on Disney+.

54 Loki, season 1, episode 1, “Glorious Purpose.”

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Long ago, there was a vast multiversal war. Countless unique timelines battled each other for supremacy, nearly resulting in the total destruction of...well, everything. But then, the all-knowing Time-Keepers emerged, bringing peace by reorganizing the multiverse into a single timeline, the Sacred Timeline. Now, the Time-Keepers protect and preserve the proper flow of time for everyone and everything. But sometimes, people like you veer off the path the Time-Keepers created. […] The TVA has stepped in to fix your mistake and set time back on its predetermined path. Now that your actions have left you without a place on the timeline, you must stand trial for your offenses.55 This concise piece of world-building tells the audience everything they need to know about the nature of time under the TVA; that it is singular and static, sacred and protected by deities for a very good reason, and in need of constant attention and careful “pruning”, i.e. deletion, of any additional emergent timelines, lest chaos break out. Equally thematically resonant, however, are the aesthetics surrounding its delivery; Miss Minutes is depicted as a bright orange, anthropomorphic cartoon clock, who delivers this authoritarian message with the saccharine positivity of a classic Saturday morning cartoon.56 This is revealed by Loki production designer Kasra Farahani in an interview with Polygon to be an intentional reference to midcentury propaganda shorts; in fact, its particular inspiration was an animated instructional video created by the U.S. Air Force.57 In this way, the retro style of the Miss Minutes cartoon creates a direct visual link between 1950s aesthetics and bureaucratic control over the timeline. ​

As the plot of Loki progresses, the show’s production design employs 1950s aesthetics to

continuously signal the nefarious power of the TVA. As stated above, most of the show takes

55

Loki, season 1, episode 1, “Glorious Purpose.”

Loki, season 1, episode 1, “Glorious Purpose.”

57 Toussaint Egan, “Loki production designer Kasra Farahani on the visual references you need an architecture degree to catch,” Polygon, Vox Media, July 13, 2021. https://www.polygon.com/22575681/loki-tva-void-visual-influences-art-design-secrets.

56

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place within the uncanny realm the TVA occupies outside of space and time; an infinite panorama is revealed the first time Loki walks past a window, filled with concrete and metal modernist architecture stretching off in all directions as if floating within an infinite, three-dimensional Cartesian grid.58 This otherworldly space is undoubtedly futuristic, but clearly dated at the same time, its fantastical spires and flying vehicles strongly reminiscent of science fiction films and artworks from the 1940s and 50s. Farahani reveals that this shot was inspired by futuristic architectural sketches made by midcentury architect Oscar Niemeyer.59 Within the buildings of the TVA itself, the midcentury architectural and design influences are even clearer; wide, warmly lit rooms with low ceilings, recessed lights arranged in honeycomb-like patterns, dark wood panelling and raw concrete, low-set chairs and couches, bold geometric forms, and molded plastic furniture in garish shades of orange grace its every room.60 Blending these disparate midcentury design elements adds to the TVA’s unsettling, timeless feel, as Farahani explains: London style brutalism was a big influence, as well as Soviet influence…there was a goal to create a contrast, almost a feeling of cognitive dissonance, by using the warm and whimsy of American mid-century modernism as a kind of skin. […] You walk into the receiving room, and it’s these beautiful warm wood browns and bright orange Saarinen inspired desks. But then, you also immediately realize that the doors all look the same and it’s a labyrinth; you’re trapped, and you don’t know how to get out the way you came.61

58

Loki, season 1, episode 1, “Glorious Purpose.”

Toussaint Egan, “Loki production designer Kasra Farahani on the visual references you need an architecture degree to catch.” See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palacio_do_Planalto.jpeg for an example of architecture by Niemeyer.

60 Rain Noe, "The Sets of Loki: Mad-Century Modernism,” Core77, November 16, 2023. https://www.core77.com/posts/126276/The-Sets-of-Loki-Mad-Century-Modernism. See this link for relevant pictures of the set design of Loki.

61 Toussaint Egan, “Loki production designer Kasra Farahani on the visual references you need an architecture degree to catch.”

59

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Through this pastiche of midcentury aesthetics, the timeless and artificial nature of this organization is made very clear to the audience. Moreover, this environment exists only for work, and everyone in it lives only to further the bureaucracy; no private living spaces are shown in the show’s entire runtime, only endless workspaces, conference rooms, cafeterias, archives, holding cells, and maze-like hallways full of unsleeping immortal workers. Ever-present are patterned rugs and elaborate mosaics replete with the TVA logo, clock and hourglass imagery, and portraits of the supposedly all-powerful Time Keepers, adorning elevator lobbies and war strategy rooms alike, hearkening back to the classical revival designs of Robsjohn-Gibbings but with a flashy, hotel-lobby twist.62 Even the sconces lining the corridor walls take the form of modernist brass hourglasses.63 These interior design details make it abundantly clear that the TVA's 1950s-style aesthetics are inseparable from the power it holds over time, since time-related motifs are inseparable from the midcentury-styled environment in which the TVA’s workers maintain the eternal status quo. ​

One of the primary stylistic influences on Loki’s production design is Brutalism, which

informs the ever-present raw concrete and the multitude of imposing megastructures appearing throughout the show. One particular Brutalist architectural reference revealed by Farahani is to the lobby of the aforementioned Breuer building, whose distinctive low ceiling covered in round, white, inverted dish-like lamps was intentionally recreated for the TVA’s waiting room in order to create the illusion of being watched by “a big sea of eyeballs”.64 Paired with a very low ceiling

62

Rain Noe, "The Sets of Loki: Mad-Century Modernism.”

Loki, season 1, episode 1, “Glorious Purpose.”

64 Toussaint Egan, “Loki production designer Kasra Farahani on the visual references you need an architecture degree to catch.” See https://www.core77.com/posts/126276/The-Sets-of-Loki-Mad-Century-Modernism and 63

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and a queueing setup reminiscent of a particularly dreary government office, the uncomfortable, alienating atmosphere of the space is intensified further. Bolstered by this reference to an iconic example of midcentury Brutalist architecture, this waiting room is at once bizarre and believable, the headquarters of an impossible, timeless bureaucracy made real. Another reference to extant Brutalist architecture can be found in the scenes taking place in the TVA archives, which were filmed in the atrium of the Atlanta Marriott Marquis Hotel.65 The archives as they appear in Loki are digitally altered, featuring layer after layer of research cubicles and archive stacks stretching off to infinity and watched over by massive statues of the Time Keepers, but the underlying structure remains recognizable.66 Its concrete cladding, repeated geometric forms and enormous scale communicate power, monumentality, and permanence, visually reinforcing the TVA’s seemingly ironclad control over time. Through these direct visual references to real-world architecture, Loki grounds its fantastical setting while reinforcing the everlasting authority of the TVA, leveraging the audience’s pre-existing associations between bureaucratic control and midcentury Brutalist design. ​

Another key element of Loki’s commentary on time is explored through the Temporal

Loom, a fantastical science fiction apparatus revealed in the show’s second season. After the events of the first season, many TVA personnel realize the ethical implications of destroying errant timelines and choose to stop doing so, leading to a massive proliferation of timelines; it is

https://whitney.org/about/breuer-building for pictures of the TVA waiting room and the Breuer building lobby, respectively.

65 “Atlanta Marriott Marquis,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, accessed December 4, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Marriott_Marquis. See this link for relevant architectural pictures.

66 Loki, season 1, episode 2, “The Variant,” directed by Kate Herron, written by Elissa Karasik, released June 16, 2021 on Disney+, streamed on Disney+.

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subsequently revealed that the Temporal Loom, “where raw time is refined into physical timeline,” has become overloaded with temporal energy and will imminently fail, destroying the TVA and every timeline in the newly-born multiverse along with it.67 The Temporal Loom represents how dependent the TVA truly is upon close control of the timeline, as once the Sacred Timeline is no more, an alternative to the Loom must quickly be found. Naturally, midcentury aesthetics are heavily involved in the many scenes playing out around the Temporal Loom. For example, while trying to repair the Loom, various characters don a protective suit which is strongly evocative of spacesuits from early science fiction media; it is impractically bulky, trimmed in teal and orange, featuring a retro triangular visor and a comically large accordion-pleated air supply tube attached to the back, reminiscent of a hot air exhaust pipe from a dryer.68 Moreover, while the protagonists attempt to solve the imminent collapse of the Loom, they do so in a control room that calls to mind imagery from the early days of NASA. This control room is semi-circular, with bright teal composite floors, a wall of windows facing the Loom, and antique computer workstations all around the back wall, comprised of cathode-ray monitors housed in molded turquoise plastic surrounded by analog knobs and dials that appear as if they could have been sourced from a midcentury nuclear power plant.69 It becomes clear over the course of the second season that the TVA’s bureaucratic, technology-dependent approach is entirely insufficient to save the multiverse, and Loki is forced to use his divine powers to destroy the Loom and replace it with none other than himself, personally overseeing the timelines in a

67

Loki, season 2, episode 1, “Ouroboros,” directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, written by Eric Martin, released October 5, 2023 on Disney+, streamed on Disney+.

68 Loki, season 2, episode 1, “Ouroboros.”

69 Loki, season 2, episode 1, “Ouroboros.”

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symbolic recreation of Yggdrasil, the tree which supports the nine realms of Norse mythology.70 This final episode even shares its title with the first episode, “Glorious Purpose”, indicating that time has been made cyclical and organic once more, representing its ultimate liberation.71 Therefore, by the end of Loki, time has been liberated from bureaucratic control and rigid technology alike. Although the timeless perspective and 1950s aesthetics of the TVA remain, they are relegated to being shepherds of a natural, ever-evolving timeline, rather than tyrants presiding over an eternal status quo. Just as in Dimitrakaki and Tsiantis’ analysis, the plot of Loki uses time travel to challenge temporal norms within its own universe, commenting obliquely on real-world social discontents while supported sub-textually by the retro aesthetics of its production design. ​

Crucially, the science fiction-inspired protective suit described above reveals one more

layer of meaning behind the retro aesthetics in Loki; that while being directly inspired by midcentury aesthetics, the show’s production design is not a period-accurate representation.

Instead, it depicts an idealized, paradigmatic reflection of the 1950s as viewed by a contemporary audience with contemporary sensibilities. The protective suit worn to repair the Loom never existed in reality, nor did anything like it, but what matters is that it feels plausibly midcentury to viewers. This motivates the deliberate mixing of disparate midcentury styles described by Farahani in yet another way, since it not only plays a role in-universe by asserting the uncanny timelessness of the TVA, but it also communicates with the audience on a meta-textual level.

Real-world aesthetic elements from eras outside the 1950s play into this ​ Crucially, the science 70

Loki, season 2, episode 6, “Glorious Purpose,” directed by Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, written by Eric Martin, released November 9, 2023 on Disney+, streamed on Disney+.

71 Loki, season 2, episode 6, “Glorious Purpose.”

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fiction-inspired protective suit described above reveals one more layer of meaning behind the retro aesthetics in Loki; that while being directly inspired by midcentury aesthetics, the show’s production design is not a period-accurate representation. Instead, it depicts an idealized, paradigmatic reflection of the 1950s as viewed by a contemporary audience with contemporary sensibilities. The protective suit worn to repair the Loom never existed in reality, nor did anything like it, but what matters is that it feels plausibly midcentury to viewers. This motivates the deliberate mixing of disparate midcentury styles described by Farahani in yet another way, since it not only plays a role in-universe by asserting the uncanny timelessness of the TVA, but it also communicates with the audience on a meta-textual level. Real-world aesthetic elements from eras outside the 1950s play into this archetypal, imagined past; for example, the sets of Loki are predominantly painted in shades of brown and orange, colours typically associated with the 1970s rather than the 1950s. Furthermore, none of the examples of Brutalist architecture referenced above were even created in the 1950s: the Breuer building was designed in 1963, the design for the Boston City Hall was publicly presented in 1962, and the Atlanta Marriott Marquis Hotel was completed in 1985, twenty-five years after the end of the era at hand.72 However, these anachronisms do not detract from the effectiveness of Loki’s visual vocabulary, since to modern viewers, the particular details of the design movements popular in each era seem practically interchangeable. What matters most for storytelling purposes is the popular association of midcentury aesthetics with timelessness, bureaucracy and control, and the ensuing narrative necessity of challenging any organization painted in the colours, both metaphorical and literal, of

72

Barry Bergdoll, “Marcel Breuer: Bauhaus Tradition, Brutalist Invention,” p. 33, Tom Acitelli, “Boston City Hall Turns 50,” and “Atlanta Marriott Marquis,” Wikipedia.

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Cold War-era governmental overreach. In this way, the anachronistic whirlwind of retro design elements featured in Loki appeals to collective memory in order to sub-textually justify Loki’s fight for his own freedom as well as that of the newly created multiverse. ​

After analyzing the depiction of time in Loki, the frequent use of retro aesthetics in its

depiction of the TVA, and the meaningful intersections of the two, the use of said aesthetics seems like a natural choice. The proposition that time travel narratives are inherently subversive in their challenge of the status quo, as presented by Dimitrakaki and Tsiantis, maps onto the primary conflict in Loki between timelessness and temporal freedom, showing the fundamental connection between authoritarianism and control over time. Next, the deliberate association posited by T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings between timelessness and midcentury modern design, as well as the popular conception of Brutalist architecture as alienating and oppressive, provide historical motivation for why timelessness and bureaucracy are associated with midcentury design in the public consciousness. With this context in mind, an analysis of the production design of Loki reveals how the Miss Minutes propaganda cartoon creates a purposeful association between control over the timeline and retro aesthetics right from the beginning of the show. This connection only strengthens as the audience learns more about the TVA. Its anachronistic pastiche of different midcentury design influences, direct references to real-world Brutalist architecture, and total dependence on the Temporal Loom reveal how profoundly its timeless vantage point outside the rigidly controlled Sacred Timeline informs its visual vocabulary.

Finally, the frequent deviations from strictly 1950s visual design in reference to the TVA reflect the modern audience for which Loki was written, for whom mid-century aesthetics are largely

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interchangeable, meaning that the TVA’s oppressive nature can be effectively signalled using paradigmatic elements from a variety of midcentury design movements. In this way, the plot and themes of Loki are strongly supported by its use of idealized 1950s aesthetics, which communicate to the audience exactly what kind of organization the TVA is and motivate the necessity of systemic change within the universe of the show.

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Bibliography Acitelli, Tom. “Boston City Hall Turns 50.” Curbed Boston. Vox Media, January 7, 2019. https://boston.curbed.com/2019/1/7/18168336/boston-city-hall-turns-50-2019.

“Atlanta Marriott Marquis.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Accessed December 4, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Marriott_Marquis Bergdoll, Barry. “Marcel Breuer: Bauhaus Tradition, Brutalist Invention.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (Summer 2016). https://www.metmuseum.org/met-publications/marcel-breuer-bauhaus-tradition-brutalist-i nvention.

Buresh, James. “T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings: Timeless Mid-Century Modern Design.” Archives of American Art Journal vol. 48, no. 1/2 (Spring 2009): 30-45. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40649414.

Dimitrakaki, Angela, and Tsiantis, Miltos. “Terminators, Monkeys and Mass Culture: The carnival of time in science fiction films.” Time & Society vol. 11 (2002): 209-231. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.dal.ca/10.1177/0961463X02011002003.

Egan, Toussaint. “Loki production designer Kasra Farahani on the visual references you need an architecture degree to catch.” Polygon. Vox Media, July 13, 2021. https://www.polygon.com/22575681/loki-tva-void-visual-influences-art-design-secrets.

Karasik, Elissa, writer. Loki. Season 1, episode 2, “The Variant.” Directed by Kate Herron, released June 16, 2021 on Disney+, streamed on Disney+.

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Martin, Eric, writer. Loki. Season 2, episode 1, “Ouroboros.” Directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, released October 5, 2023 on Disney+, streamed on Disney+.

Martin, Eric, writer. Loki. Season 2, episode 6, “Glorious Purpose.” Directed by Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, released November 9, 2023 on Disney+, streamed on Disney+.

Noe, Rain. "The Sets of Loki: Mad-Century Modernism.” Core77. November 16, 2023. https:// www.core77.com/posts/126276/The-Sets-of-Loki-Mad-Century-Modernism. van den Heuvel, Dirk. “Between brutalists: The Banham hypothesis and the Smithson way of life.” The Journal of Architecture vol. 20, no. 2 (2015): 293-308. https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2015.1027721.

Waldron, Michael, writer. Loki. Season 1, episode 1, “Glorious Purpose.” Directed by Kate Herron, released June 9, 2021 on Disney+, streamed on Disney+.

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The Extended Line as a Template of Truth in Grassmann's Ausdehnunslehre Jane Courtney In 1844, Hermann Grassmann published the first edition of the Ausdehnungslehre, the title roughly translating to 'The Calculus of Extension' (Lewis 2011, 109). Although its merit was hardly recognized at first, its later popularity after the publication of its second edition led to the teachings of the Ausdehnungslehre forming the basis of the modern field of linear algebra (Lewis 1995, iv). In a close reading of the forward and the introduction to the first edition of the Ausdehnungslehre (which will from now on be referred to as the A1), which contains a philosophical basis for the work, the theme of unity continually arises. Unity is present at each step of the A1, appearing as a motivating and substantiating factor at the smallest and largest scales of Grassmann's project. It can be argued that Grassmann uses the thesis of his Extension Theory, which provides a mathematical framework for extensive magnitudes, as an analogy for his entire mathematical project. The various components of Grassmann’s mathematics gain their truth in imitation of an extensive magnitude. In other words, the structural and dialectical components of Grassmann’s arguments embody the form of the extended line, Grassmann’s mathematical object of study. This is elucidated through a study of Grassmann’s style of argumentation, and how he describes one can arrive at ‘real’ and ‘formal’ truths. Unity arises in the structures and methods employed in the A1, and then Grassmann's description of the 'scientific quality' and the variety of applications the Extension Theory. Here, a background on 17th century geometry will be presented to situate Grassmann's mathematics in its intellectual context. Then, a detailed description of Grassmann's conception of the extended line will be

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presented, followed by a detailing of the similarities between Grassmann's work and the features of an extended line.

By the time Hermann Grassmann published the A1, the authority of geometry had been cast completely into doubt (Lewis 2011, 109). Stemming from the interrogation of Euclid’s fifth axiom, which investigates the nature of parallel lines, mathematicians in the nineteenth century began to propose alternatives to Euclidean geometry (Mario Livio 2009, 150). The position that geometry elucidated fundamental truths of nature, held by many eighteenth century thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and even David Hume, was thrown into question by these alternative geometries (Livio 2009, 151).

In his paper “Extension and Measurement: A constructivist program from Leibniz to Grassmann”, Erik C. Banks situates the A1 within a centuries-long project to address the issue of extension. Extension, through the description of various thinkers, has generally been defined as continuous apartness, like the length of an object or a physical distance. Grassmann describes extension in his introduction, stating “with the extensive magnitude there prevails the separation of elements that are indeed unified insofar as they form a single magnitude, but which constitute that magnitude precisely in their mutual separation.” (Grassman 1844, 27) This most notably describes our intuition of space, in which we observe extended surfaces, but can be applied to other areas of measurement, like the duration of time or the stages of a process (Banks 2013, 20).

This is opposed to the notion of an ‘intensive magnitude’, which represents magnitudes as an intensity (i.e. temperature). Although extension seems like an intuitive, fundamental feature of reality, Banks notes that mathematics before the A1 did not differentiate between extensive and

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intensive magnitudes (2013, 20). This is at the crux of the issue of extension, as thinkers like Rene Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Kant dispute the fundamental-ness of extension.

The first edition of the A1, describes the characteristics of his new form of algebra which was specifically undertaken to solving the issue of extension in geometry. Banks states, “Grassmann claimed that because his geometric algebra described abstract entities and relations at a level prior to extension, they could be used to analyze the concept of extension, where sensory human visualizations could no longer reach.” (2013, 21) He attempted to develop his branch of mathematics solely through reason, a method which would escape any assumptions about the fundamental nature of reality. Grassmann does not even term his Extension Theory a branch of geometry, as geometry assumes the existence of extended space, and thus, is not a purely abstract discipline (1844, 24). The abstractness of his method, however, calls into question the fundamental-ness of the relations he derives between geometric identities. If the Extension Theory had been developed completely separately from any empirical data, what leads Grassmann to believe it can be used to treat empirical problems? Grassmann’s method suggests that he would take a similar approach to Henri Poincaré, in which geometrical models are merely conventions – the geometrist simply chooses the model that proves most useful in their specific case. (Livio 2009, 161) Yet, the language Grassmann uses to describe his theory suggests that he views the work in his A1 as more than a geometric construction.

In the forward to the first edition of the A1, Grassmann presents his apologetics to Extension Theory. He states, “the truth demands its rights. It is not this work that brings it into existence or recognition: it has its essence and existence in itself, and it is a betrayal of the truth

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to minimize its just claims from false modesty.” (Grassmann 1844, 16) Here, Grassmann refers to his theory as an entity that exists separately from his work in the A1, describing it as 'truth' that can only be contradicted by incorrect theories and assertions. This is furthered by Grassmann's categorization of the branches of mathematics, which stem from the possible combinations of two sets of mathematical dichotomies: discrete mathematics is opposed to continuous mathematics, and algebraic systems are opposed to combinatorial systems (Grassmann 1844, 27).

The Extension Theory, according to Grassmann, articulates the fourth combination, which combines continuous and combinatorial (1844, 27). The other three combinations had already been articulated and, thus, the mathematics of extensive magnitudes was bound to be developed, if not by Grassmann, then by another mathematician. What leads Grassmann, then, to assert the his Extension Theory as a fundamental truth? The answer suggested here is that the theory’s truth comes from the its grounding in the form of the extended line.

The philosophical introduction to the A1 starts from first principles, as Grassmann describes the various routes for arriving at philosophical and mathematical conclusions. He states, “The principal division of sciences is into real and formal. The real represent the existent in thought as existing independently of thought, and their truth consists in the correspondence of the thought with that existent. The formal on the other hand have as their object what has been produced by thought alone, and their truth consists in the correspondence between the thought processes themselves.” (Grassmann 1844, 23) The 'formal' science Grassmann describes here is abstract knowledge, based solely in the intellect: "proof in the formal science does not extend beyond the sphere of thought." (Grassmann 1844, 23) The 'real' is empirical knowledge, which is

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closely tied to physical objects. For each of these cases, he states "their truth consists in the correspondence" between the two subjects (either between two thoughts or between an object and the thought concerning said object) (Grassmann 1844, 23). He identifies the location of truth, in a line of reasoning, as the 'correspondence' between the two initial components. On this process, the correspondence during the formation of a 'formal' postulate, he states, "the opposition between equal and different is also fluid [...] two different ideas are already equal insofar as they are conjoined by the activity of relating them." (Grassmann 1844, 26) The process of scientific reasoning, as Grassmann depicts it, is in the form of an extensive magnitude. He states, "with the extensive magnitude there prevails the separation of elements that are indeed unified insofar as they form a single magnitude, but which constitute that magnitude precisely in their mutual separation." (Grassmann 1844, 27) In the same way, the truth, in Grassmann's model for scientific reasoning, comes from the unification of separate components. Knowledge cannot be arrived at through a summation or reconciliation of two different thoughts, rather, syllogistically, "the tension between contrasting pairs [determines] the concepts." (Lewis 2003, 21) It is because each thought maintains its unique identity that knowledge is produced in their relation.

The extended line is also mimicked by the structure Grassmann argues scientific reasoning should take. In the forward to the second edition of the A1, Grassmann addressed the failure of the first publication of his Extension Theory. He states, it cannot be attributed to the content of the mathematics, rather, I know the reason thereof is found only in the rigorously scientific method of treatment, starting from the most primitive concepts. Such a method of treatment requires not merely an incidental appreciation of this or that result, but a complete immersion in the fundamental ideas and, based on this foundation, a consistent conception of the whole structure" (Grassmann 1844, 19).

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For Grassmann, a knowledge of the particular conclusions that he arrives at through the reasoning in the A1 is not sufficient. In order to grasp the significance of the particular conclusions, one requires an understanding of the mathematical endeavor as a whole; "a full appreciation of [the] individual parts is supported by an overview of the whole." (Grassmann 1844, 19) His complaint above indicates that Grassmann believed his readers were solely engaging with his mathematical axioms, excluding the entirety of his philosophical project, this being the reason why the A1 did not succeed. This is demonstrated in a letter to Möbius in 1845, in which the mathematician E. F. Apelt considers the form of multiplication in Extension Theory.

In Grassmann's new branch of algebra, multiplication is no longer 'commutative', meaning the order in which terms are multiplied impacts the value of their product (Lewis 2003, 25): 𝑀𝑢𝑙𝑡𝑖𝑝𝑙𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑖𝑛 𝐴𝑟𝑖𝑡ℎ𝑚𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑐 𝐴𝑙𝑔𝑒𝑏𝑟𝑎: 𝑎∙𝑏 = 𝑏∙𝑎 𝑀𝑢𝑙𝑡𝑖𝑝𝑙𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑖𝑛 𝐸𝑥𝑡𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑜𝑟𝑦: 𝑎∙𝑏 =− 𝑏∙𝑎 From this discrepancy, Apelt concludes, "It seems to me that a false philosophy of mathematics is at the bottom of it. [...] Grassmann 1894–1911 (vol. 3, part 2, p. 101)" (Lewis 2003, 25). In consideration of the particular conclusions alone, and an ignorance of the underlying method and system, is what leads Apelt to dismiss the particular relations Grassmann presents in the A1.

In the philosophical preface to the Extension Theory, this concept is furthered, as Grassmann argues for a specific method of mathematical pedagogy. He laments for the inadequacy of the standard Euclidean "axiom–definition–theorem–proof" style of presentation, arguing that it lacks an overview (Lewis 2003, 19). He states,

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"we add the scientific quality to a method of treatment when the reader is, on one hand, led by it necessarily to the recognition of each individual truth, and, on the other, is put in the position at each point of the development of seeing the direction of further progress." (Grassmann 1884, 30) This method of presentation is twofold: it requires a continual arrival at differing, individual mathematical relations, in tandem with an acknowledgement of the particulars' continuous fulfillment of an overarching idea. This 'dominant idea' is essential to the work as "One cannot be led to a desired result by blind combinations" (Grassmann 1844, 31).

This process can be directly compared to Grassmann's description of the extended line. In the 'Exposition of the concept of Extension Theory' in Grassmann's philosophical preface, he states, "the extensive form is the collection of all elements into which the generating element is transformed by a continuous evolution." (Grassmann 1844, 29) According to Grassmann, however, the differing elements "must be produced according to a law if it is to have a specific resultant" (Grassmann 1844, 29) Without a direction, the identity of the particular elements that make up the extended line "would be completely indeterminate" (Grassmann 1844, 29). We can take the extended line produced in a graphical representation of 𝑦 = sin 𝑠𝑖𝑛 𝑥 as an example.

The individual coordinates that make up the extended sine wave gain their values from an overarching sine function.

This language is eerily similar to the language Grassmann uses to describe his twofold method of mathematical presentation. Recall: "there occurs a continual reflection about the course of development as the truths are discovered; a characteristic line of thought develops in the reader about the procedure followed and about the idea lying at the foundation of the whole; and this line of thought forms the true nucleus and spirit of his activity, while the consistent

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detailing of the truths is only the embodiment of that idea." (Grassmann 1844, 32) As the individual components of the extended line are produced, their identity determined by a directing law, the individual mathematical particular truths, in Grassmann's mathematical structure, is produced and ruled by a specific 'dominant idea'. Grassmann maintains that this proper method of presentation is equally important as the mathematical content, "perfecting the method is as much the job of a mathematician as getting the proofs right." (Lewis 2003, 34) For Grassmann, a work can only be 'scientific' if it can convey the significance and justification of its content at the same time as it conveys the individual mathematical relations. The poor reception of the A1 was proof that truth cannot be attained through the consideration of the conclusions of a theory, but through a twofold progression through stages in which the reader assumed the position of a 'discoverer' (Lewis 2003, 20).

The theme of unity also presents itself in the various practical applications of Grassmann's Extension Theory. Although the theory was originally meant to treat geometric problems, Grassmann describes how he haphazardly stumbled upon a variety of empirical disciplines that he would be able to treat using his calculus (Grassmann 1844, 10). The first example of this appears in the forward when Grassmann attempts to apply his algebra to the existing mathematics describing tides. He states, "When I combined this concept of the product with [mathematics] previously established for the sum, the most striking harmony resulted."

(Grassmann 1844, 9) Grassmann provides an explanation for this in his discussion of mathematics and philosophy, stating, "Since both mathematics and philosophy are sciences in the strictest sense, so must the methods in both have something in common which makes them thus

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scientific." (Grassmann 1844, 30) The sundry applications of Extension Theory, although they are distinguished from each other, are united by their possession of this 'scientific quality'. This is what allows Extension Theory, for Grassmann, to apply to other scientific fields. As Lewis puts it, "the justification of its method thus depends in a dialectical fashion on the same method being used in other branches of mathematics and in the other sciences." (2011, 110) The ability of the Extension theory to apply to the practical disciplines comes from the commonality of their methods.

Lewis, in his 2011 paper titled 'The Divine Truth of Mathematics and the Origins of Linear Algebra', analyzes the influence of the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher on Grassmann's A1. He first presents a summary of Dialektik, Schleiermacher’s treatise on the reconciliation of science and religion. Through the Dialektik, Schleiermacher argues a relativistic approach to knowledge: in thinking of an object, said object is already put in relation to other objects. He arrives at the conclusion that ‘there is in actuality no pure knowledge, rather only different concentric spheres of commonality of methods and principles”, where “particular knowledge can only be completed through its relation to the whole” (Lewis 2011, 113-114) Thus, for Schleiermacher, "the measure of truth or knowledge in thought is, therefore, its degree of correspondence with the outer entities to which it refers." (Lewis 2011, 113) The first edition of the A1, is titled, in its English translation as, “The Calculus of Extension”, “a new branch of mathematics elucidated through applications to the other branches of mathematics as well as to statics, mechanics, the theory of magnetism and crystallography.”

(Lewis 2011, 109, 110) This title is telling: the abstract relations Grassmann presents in the A1

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must necessarily be presented alongside its applications in order to assert their validity. Here, Grassmann is demonstrating the truth of the Extension Theory by presenting the level of correspondence it has with other sciences, this correspondence provided by their shared 'scientific quality'. Again, the parallel to Grassmann's description of the extended line is clear: an extended line is comprised of separate entities united through a 'dominant idea', their correspondence through the dominant idea is what produces the extended line.

As we move from the smallest scale of Grassmann's reasoning, through the structure of Grassmann's arguments, to the relation of Extension Theory to practical disciplines, the analogy to the extended line continually appears. Grassmann's entire scientific content depends on a dialectical tension between ideas at a fundamental level. His method of instruction follows a twofold process of continual discovery of individual truths, directed by an overarching view. The manifold applications of Extension Theory are united, and thus in correspondence with each other, through a shared 'scientific quality'. In each of these cases, as a component imitates the form of an extended line, they simultaneously gain their validity. A true evaluation of the Ausdehnungslehre, as Grassmann continually stresses, requires a reader's full immersion into his interconnected system of components.

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Works Cited Banks, Erik C. “Extension and Measurement: A Constructivist Program from Leibniz to Grassmann.” Studies in history and philosophy of science. Part A 44, no. 1 (2013): 20–31.

Grassmann, Hermann. A New Branch of Mathematics : The “Ausdehnungslehre” of 1844 and Other Works. Open Court, 1995.

Lewis, Albert C. “The Divine Truth of Mathematics and the Origins of Linear Algebra.”

Theology and Science, vol. 9, no. 1, 2011, pp. 109–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/14746700.2011.547012.

Lewis, Albert C. “The Unity of Logic, Pedagogy and Foundations in Grassmann’s Mathematical Work.” History and Philosophy of Logic, vol. 25, no. 1, 2004, pp. 15–36, https://doi.org/10.1080/01445340310001613824.

Livio, Mario. Is God a Mathematician? 1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed, 2010., Simon & Schuster, 2009.

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Know Thy Nature: Odin as the Cultivator of Spirit and Surplus Knowledge James Godsall “The wisdom of nature is the nature of wisdom.” These words came from my late grandfather, Terry (died March 28, 2024). His conception of the cosmos mirrors those who have immersed themselves in the wilderness, a world full of meaning and signs. The complexity of nature has within it an expanse of unknown knowledge, a wholeness of perspective which is imminent, yet unfathomable to the human mind. Attempting to reconcile the individual with the enormity of the unknown is a fundamental aspect of human identity. Unlike the modern conception

of

scientific rationalism and individualism, which privileges humanity’s

“knowingness”73 as a form of elevated difference, those who lived close to nature believed in greater possibilities of communion with the chthonic sphere. Like my grandfather, the Norse saw the wisdom of nature and the inner qualities of humanities’ animal self. The Norse believed they co-existed within a fluid ecosystem, and that their perspective and knowledge was informed by their connection to this unconscious nature, rather than transcending it. Inspired by Peter Struck’s concept of surplus knowledge and Jungian notions of widened consciousness, the aggregation of awareness within the Norse world can be defined by how humans connect with the web of spirit within their cosmos. Embodied in their chief god, Odin, Norse surplus knowledge develops from a type of psychic growth, a synthesis which comes from confronting and connecting with humanity’s creaturely spirit, the flygjur, as a form of natural wisdom.

73

Peter Struck, Divination and Human Nature, (Princeton University Press, 2016), 2.

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To help understand the Norse perspective, Carl Jung and Peter Struck help construct a framework of analysis. Their theories complement one another when considering the communion between layers of reality: the conscious and unconscious on a personal and social scale. Carl Jung’s map of the human psyche places the individual’s conscious ego in a vast web of hidden influences found in the collective unconscious, “the chthonic portion of the psyche . . . which . . . is attached to nature.”74 The unconscious enables the ego to focus by holding back “repressed memories and undeveloped possibilities.”75 These possibilities are tied to phenomena that Peter Struck describes in his axiom: “Our ability to know exceeds our capacity to understand that ability.”76 Similar to Jung, Struck sees human beings as “composite creatures,” part “knowingness,” an intelligence which borders the divine, and part “creaturely,” stemming from our bodily nature.77 The layered experience in which humans make sense of the world produces what Struck calls “surplus knowledge,” or, in Jung’s case, “widened consciousness,”78 in which the individual achieves communion with a wider sense of consciousness, transcending their sense of self into an elevated state of cognition where the individual is “more than the sum of their parts,”79 attaining an “indissoluble communion with the world at large.”80 This ability to draw on the mysterious knowledge of the unconscious is inherent to human nature, and cultures throughout history have attempted to make sense of this experience in a variety of ways, largely

74

Marleigh M. Poulsen, “The Trickster’s Function in Healing Anxiety” (master’s thesis, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2024), 11.

75 Poulsen, 11.

76 Struck, 15.

77 Struck, 2.

78 Poulsen, 12.

79 Struck, 15.

80 Poulsen, 12.

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through their conception of whether this awareness is drawn from humanity’s connection to nature or its distance from it.

Odin’s insatiable quest for greater knowledge offers the Norse perspective on this awareness. With characteristics ranging “from cold cynicism to Dionysian enthusiasm, from ferocity to ecstasy,”81 Odin is a liminal and capricious figure, but Richard L. Auld sees Odin as a radically unitary bridge between dualistic poles of the human mind and the Norse cosmos.

Following the logic of Jung’s protégé, Erich Neumann, the human psyche consists of two psychological states, one being the “unconscious mind with its intuitive through process,” termed “matriarchal,” and the other which is organized around rational laws and the denial of the matriarchal world, which is “patriarchal.”82 These two states are antagonistic to one another, but corollary is necessary to stave off psychic illness which comes from an overindulgence in the prejudice of one kind of perspective.83 Odin as “the purveyor of knowledge from one pole to the other,” acts as a god of synthesis, enabling an integrating bond linking the two opposing halves of the psyche.84 This conception of Odin makes sense from a Jungian perspective. In Marleigh M. Poulsen’s thesis “The Trickster’s Function in Healing and Anxiety,” the Jungian archetype of the “trickster” is both “bestial and divine,”85 who resides in the liminal space. Odin, like other tricksters, blurs boundaries, creating communication between opposing polarities of the psyche.

81

Richard L. Auld, “The Psychological and Mythic Unity of the God, Óđinn,” Numen 23, Fasc. 2 (1976): 146) Auld, 147-8.

83 Auld, 148.

84 Auld, 147.

85 Poulsen, 22.

82

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An analysis of Norse Mythology corroborates Odin’s position of synthesis. Catalyzed by an “insatiable, perpetual appetite”86 for knowledge, which is his nature, Auld follows Neumann in charting Odin’s critical moments of knowledge aggregation as a form of initiation, beginning in the matriarchal and progressively moving into patriarchal awareness. While Odin draws on many aspects of the chthonic world, death, as “the repository of all life, but also the repository of all knowledge”, acts as the symbol “par excellence of the unconscious mind.”87 There are many episodes in which Odin communicates with the dead for information, and his moments of self-sacrifice act as the catalysts for psychic growth. The most significant moment to Neumann is Odin’s hanging on the world tree, Yggdrasil, as depicted in the Hávamál. Odin’s sacrifice of himself to himself on the tree of life exemplifies communion with the matriarchal “Great Goddess,” the process by which awareness is gained through “sacrifice and suffering [as] the prerequisites of transformation,” and he partakes in her divine essence as the “giver” of wisdom.

88

When Odin attains knowledge of the runes, it is a gift which comes from the goddess “of all

growth, psychic as well as physical.”89 Despite the wisdom gained through this state of possession, Auld and Neumann do not award this communion with unconscious nature an ascendent position within the Norse cosmos. For Auld, Odin’s “pinnacle” is found in his movement into “higher masculinity,”90 found in the wakeful torture of the Grimnismal, in which he himself becomes the “self-sufficient” source of his own oracle.91 Odin’s “highest capabilities”

86

Poulsen, 32.

Auld, 150.

88 Auld, 151.

89 Auld, 156.

90 Auld, 156.

91 Auld, 156.

87

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92

come from the aggregation of conscious awareness, gaining a grip on nature through ever

greater independence from it. Through this assessment, Odin’s liminal movement as a trickster and a purveyor of awareness rises from the unconscious into the conscious.

While this Jungian analysis of Odin is correct in portraying his liminality, it fails to capture the Norse perspective of the unconscious, and thus comes to the wrong conclusion. For the Norse, animality informs the relationship between human consciousness and the creaturely self. They saw themselves in terms of their relationship to the wider ecosystem of the cosmos and not their distance from it, as “each creature has a role that lends itself to the continuation of Yggdrasil, the family tree.”93 Humanity was part of a larger kinship within nature, and a sense of self came from greater proximity to their creaturely unconscious. This sense of fluidity and community, between the human and the animal world, features strongly in how they view divinity. While the Norse identity was more closely associated with the Aesir, the humanoid clan of gods which Odin led as king, the cosmos itself was populated and motivated by divine animals. Across Yggdrasil, “the most important elements of the tree that contains all the worlds [...] pertained to animals,” and each animal was known for their own sphere of wisdom, and existed for their own means, beyond the human and even the Aesir’s service.94 The natural world was a divine ecosystem, and the realm of intelligence and knowledge was by no means reserved to human or godly abstractions.

92

Auld, 157.

Nicole Davidow, “God, Women, Wolves, and Men: Species, Gender, and Kinship in Norse Myth and Saga,” (master’s thesis, Georgetown University, 2023), 19.

94 Davidow, 18.

93

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On the contrary, the greater the distance between the human and animal world, the greater the former’s ignorance. Each person constructed their ‘self’ in terms of their flygjur, a protective animal spirit which attached itself to individuals and guided them until death.95 Rather than thinking through abstractions, for the Norse, “identity and selfhood depend largely on this association with the animal world. Entire families were defined by a single ancestor's association with a bear, wolf, or bird.”96 The flygjur tied humanity to the world around them. It reflected the fact the Norse did not operate through an oppositional binary between the human and natural self, but, rather, perceived a fundamentally interconnected relationship. Greater attunement to the animal world offered surplus knowledge and widened awareness. Appearing in dreams, the animal-self acted as spirit guides, conveying messages from the unconscious world beyond.97 In The Saga of the Volsungs, during the night of a storm, Gudrun dreams of a hawk approaching her, which her servant recognizes as the appearance of an animal flygjur, heralding a man yet unknown.98 Gudrun dreams again later on of a stag, and a wolf cub spattered with the blood of her brother, heralding her first husband Sigurd as the Stag and her second husband, Atli, as the wolf who will bring her pain.99 In both cases the flygjur crucially comes at a time of change, a moment of fate and crisis, informing individuals of who and what is to come.100 As part of a Norse view of fatalism, nature comes with its own necessities, and it's not the role of humanity to understand it, but to reconcile their nature.

95

Davidow, 19.

Davidow, 30.

97 Davidow, 29.

98 Davidow, 30-1.

99 Davidow, 31.

100 Davidow, 32.

96

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Odin is not the god of consciousness, but of spiritual animality. When he and his brothers created the first humans, Ask and Embla, “weak [and] fateless” driftwood, they each imbued a different quality into these virgin beings: “Odin gave them breath, / Honir gave them souls, / Loth gave them hair / and human faces.”101 Souls are personal things, a subjective consciousness, while Loth’s hamr, outer forms, are only skin deep. Odin’s imbuement of breath, pneuma, is the gift of spirit, humanity’s sympathetic communion with life and nature. Odin ties humanity to their flygjur. Human beings who can shed their consciousness and their hamr are said to have tasted Odin’s gift, gaining greater communion and awareness with nature. Berserkrs and Úlfhednars, were fierce warriors who could abandon their consciousness and enter a trance of animality, like a bear or wolf respectively, channeling an animality which empowers them, commanding fear and respect.102 Odin, whose name derives from wuot ‘fury,’103 or óðr ‘furious,’ 104

represents the state of possession, a communion with humanity’s nature and flygjur. Skaldic

poets were said to be aroused by Odin, imbibing the gift of blood mead brewed from the flesh of the wisest god, Kvasir, providing them “poetic imagination originating in spittle and blood.”105 Odin disrupts the consciousness, drawing out an awareness which is otherwise present in the “[k]nowledge found in flesh and blood.”106 In the myth of Sigurd and the dragon Fafnir, Sigurd unlocks this communion on his own terms by consuming the heart and the blood of the dragon.

101

Jackson Crawford, The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 2015), 6.

102 Davidow, 40.

103 Ahl, 158.

104 William Sayers, “The Mythological Ravens Huginn and Muninn: Interrogators of the Newly Slain” (Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis 139, no. 2, 2022), 148.

105 Sayers, 150.

106 Sayers, 150.

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When the serpent's blood touched his tongue, he could understand the language of the birds, who began to advise him on imminent threats on his horizon.107 Rather than the kind of human interpretation found in augury, Sigurd is in direct communication with nature. It's not the birds who have changed, it's Sigurd who has gained the ability to understand animal intelligence.108 For the Norse, the nature of surplus knowledge and its achievement comes from thinking like animals, communicating with nature, and shedding the veil of human understanding.

Odin’s role in this natural order is to cultivate spirit and greater animality. In their study on the role of tricksters and the wilderness, Marleigh M. Poulsen elaborates the trickster’s role in psychic growth through confrontation with the unconscious. Tricksters blur boundaries, disrupting the security of the conscious and sow anxiety, “the beckoning call of the unconscious.”

109

Odin, the mercurial god of many names, inspires this anxiety, as every moment of anxiety and

crisis offers “the opportunity to meet inner qualities that ‘exceeds [one’s] wildest dreams.’”110 An individual’s flygjur, the source of their strength and awareness, appears visibly in times of change and crisis, whether awake or in dreams.111 Critically, these spirits appear when an individual, or their kin, is under threat and “requires growth.”112 Flygjur represent surplus knowledge, a genie of sorts, which hovers over the shoulder and inspires psychic growth. Odin acts as its catalyst.

Odin’s reputation for being untrustworthy and capricious thus serves a purpose, and his actions, whether benign or violent, cause disruption to draw out the strength of spirit. This can be

107

Crawford, 248.

Davidow, 38.

109 Poulsen, 15.

110 Poulsen, 2.

111 Davidow, 31.

112 Davidow, 32.

108

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seen when he taunts his son, Thor, in a flyting (a lyrical battle of insults). Disguised as an old ferryman, Odin holds no apparent advantages over the god of Thunder, but his insults and trickery cause Thor to lose his composure. Like other tricksters, Odin plays games to “flip constructs on their head,”113 using cheek and humour to upset self-control, testing his son’s character and resolve, rather than the strength of his arm. In the Grimnismal, Odin reveals his nature to Geirroth, a man who lost his the god’s favour by torturing him, rather than welcoming him in as a guest in disguise. He is “Wisdom-Granter, […] Waker and Killer, […] Odin is my name. / But before they called me Terror,” he has never been known by just one name, and these names are “for [him] alone.”114 Seeking to control, Geirroth made the fateful error of choosing to “panic and bind the trickster,” suppressing change instead of allowing commerce with accident.

Odin speaks on behalf of Geirroth’s wiser animality, “I know your life has ended / Your guardian spirits are anxious, / they see Odin here before you.”115 Geirroth’s flygjur recognize Odin, even if he consciously cannot. His human eyes deceive him. Odin is a terrifying revelation of nature, the fury of animality, and the communicator of fate. Geirroth dies, not for his lack of knowledge, but because of his lack of natural wisdom.

Knowledge is susceptible to disruption, but wisdom continually grows. The Norse recognized that there exists a consistent truth beyond the world of human awareness, a greater awareness that defies reason. Awareness was not defined by the consciousness of the individual, or their sensual experience of hamr “shape,” which surrounds it, but through flygjur, the spirit at the heart of all natural things. The divine ecosystem of Norse cosmology was a system in and of 113

Poulsen, 27.

Crawford, 70-71.

115 Crawford, 71.

114

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itself, an intelligence which could be understood only through greater communion with it. Odin acts as a force of disruption, bringing out the spirit by confronting the human psyche’s limitations. There is always a greater awareness beyond human consciousness. To foster surplus knowledge and a greater awareness, individuals must find the wilderness within their own nature.

Bibliography Auld, Richard L. “The Psychological and Mythic Unity of the God, Óđinn.” Numen, Vol 23.

Fasc. 2. (Aug. 1976), pp 145-160. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3269665 Crawford, Jackson. The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company Inc. 2015 Davidow, Nicole. “God, Women, Wolves, and Men: Species, Gender, and Kinship in Norse Myth and Saga.” Master’s thesis. Georgetown University, 2023. https://ezproxy.library.dal.ca/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/go d-women-wolves-men-species-gender-kinship-norse/docview/2909990568/se-2.

Poulsen, Marleigh. M. “The Trickster’s Function in Healing Anxiety.” Master’s thesis, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2024.

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https://ezproxy.library.dal.ca/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/tric ksters-function-healing-anxiety/docview/2937238327/se-2.

Sayers, William. “The Mythological Norse Ravens Huginn and Muninn: Interrogators of the Newly Slain.” Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis 139, no. 2 (2022): 143-155. https://ezproxy.library.dal.ca/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/myt hological-norse-ravens-huginn-muninn/docview/2894335163/se-2.

Struck, Peter. Divination and Human Nature. Princeton University Press, 2016.

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A Call for Ambiguity: Preciado on Blurring Gender and Form Sophia Taylor The bio-hacking revolution explored in Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie provides a how-to guide for the radical reclamation of transgender medicine. Preciado’s search for “hormonal justice”116 depicts his transformation from a medical and legal subject into a lab rat of his own making. He describes his experience appropriating the “poison bullets” of unlicensed testosterone through TESTOGEL117 and how he now uses it as a medicine. Through outlining the monopoly that pharmaceutical and surgical enterprises have over the transgender community and the performance of gender, he describes a vision of the future that gives political significance back to consumers of hormones. However, Preciado also walks the line between auto-experimentation and addiction, and illustrates the delicate balance between medical liberation and dependency. Through his interwoven narrative styles, he begs his audience to accept and indulge in formlessness, blurring the line between scientist and subject, male and female, medic and addict, through the seizure of sex hormones as “free biocodes.” 118 Preciado’s term “technogender” is rooted in the history of the term “gender,” a modern concept that proliferated in the 1940s through the medical and therapeutic industries.119 Preciado partially attributes the standardization of gender to John Money, a sexologist who surgically altered intersex infants to fit the gendered normativity of either male or female.120 Preciado writes 116

Paul Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. (New York: Feminist Press 2016), p. 140.

117 Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 55.

118 Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 55.

119 Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 99.

120 Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 101.

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that perception has driven gender categories, and for a body to be visible, it must decisively fit within a male or female gender.121 To counteract this history, he embarks on a medical project to revise normative gender, as to him, gender is inherently a performance. When describing Judith Butler’s critique of gender theory, he writes, “gender is a system of rules, conventions, social norms, and institutional practices that performatively produce the subject they claim to describe.”

122

However, he expands upon her definition by writing, “[g]ender is an operational program

capable of triggering a proliferation of sensory perceptions under the form of affects, desires, actions, beliefs, and identities.”123 Under this modified definition, gender is still rooted in visual perception and association of gendered characteristics, as proliferated by Money. However, the language of programming also sends a message of the potential to reprogram, or rather, edit the “biocode.”124 As a reflection of his definition of gender, Preciado’s work with testosterone seeks to remove himself from being an easily identifiable subject by systems of power. His source of testosterone is TESTOGEL, although the drug’s label asserts that it is meant only for adult, heterosexual males.125By using this product without being a heterosexual or cis-gendered male, Preciado subverts medical and legal gender standardization. Furthermore, he describes how testosterone does not change the way that others perceive his gender.126 This implies a more radical form of experimentation, as it decentralizes external perception in fortifying one’s gender identity. He additionally writes, “[w]hat would happen if a large proportion of cis-females began collectively self-administering enough doses of testosterone to be socially 121

Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 102.

Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 110.

123 Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 117.

124 Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 394.

125 Preciado, Testo Junkie, pp. 58-61.

126 Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 141.

122

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identified as males?”127 This subversive language is a core component of what transforms these sections on his personal experience with testosterone into revolutionary guides. Preciado calls on those unfulfilled by current medical systems and touts self-experimentation as a viable pathway for both cisgender and transgender liberation.

In “Regulating Healthy Gender: Surgical Body Modification among Transgender and Cisgender Consumers,” Elroi Windsor conducts research on the experiences of transgender and cisgender people regarding gender–affirming surgery. He finds that the psychological and physical pains transgender and cisgender people face are quite similar, as both are equally likely to “report mild discomfort as well as severe dysphoria.”128 This highlights how feelings of inadequate gender performativity are not an issue unique to transgender people, as “[cisgendered people] still believed surgery could help enhance their gender expressions, help them conform to normative gendered embodiment.”129 This follows the theory that all bodies are altered and performing, and everyday modifications, such as wearing deodorant or scented lotion, often follow gender expectations.130 Preciado also explores this in his analysis of TESTOGEL, as he ruminates on the purpose of such a product for a cis-gendered male, by what criteria they are deemed deficient in testosterone, and if their maleness is defined on a chromosomal, genital, or legal basis.131 However, despite the similarities between the cisgender and transgender search for gender-affirmation, Windsor finds that the two groups are treated significantly different in their processes of obtaining medical care. Additional requirements,

127

Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 234.

Elroi Windsor, "Regulating Healthy Gender: Surgical Body Modification among Transgender and Cisgender Consumers," (Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2011), p. 101.

129 Windsor, "Regulating Healthy Gender,” p. 111.

130 Windsor, "Regulating Healthy Gender,” p. 111.

131 Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 60.

128

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such as age limits and psychotherapist assessments, are found to be skewed towards transgender people, which emphasizes that transgender desires are subject to external approval.132 This is what Preciado refers to when he writes about the medical regulation of transgender bodies and why he states, “I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave the right way.”133 By recognizing the prejudiced and overly regulatory control of transgender medical care, Preciado fuels his desire for self-experimentation.

In “The Biodrag of Genre in Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era,” Sophie Jones explores Preciado’s refusal to be categorized as a form of “biodrag,” or rather, an alternative to normative gender performance.134 Jones claims the very form of Preciado’s book, as an amalgamation of pornography, personal anecdotes, and medical and social history, is representative of his ambiguous identity. She writes, “genre becomes a way of organising a central tension in the book [...].”135 The tension in Preciado’s project is illustrated by his “both/and” approach to gender and legal identity, as he writes, “I decide to keep my legal identity as a woman and to take testosterone without subscribing to a sex change protocol.”136 He states that we must reappropriate technology as a form of revolution, which extends from hormones into the realm of gender expression.137 In this way, Preciado is not advocating for a non-binary identity specifically, but rather a sense of political formlessness that

132

Windsor, "Regulating Healthy Gender,” pp. 139-40.

Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 138.

134 Sophie Jones, “The Biodrag of Genre in Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era.” Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics 2, no. 2 (2018): 2.

135 Jones, “The Biodrag of Genre,” p. 1.

136 Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 61.

137 Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 344.

133

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comes with appropriating juxtaposing identities.138 Preciado’s language of revolution additionally illustrates the delicate balance between medical experimentation and self-induced suffering. He writes, “[w]hen I take a dose of testosterone in gel form or inject it, what I’m actually giving myself is a chain of political signifiers.”139 This language of political significance is reflective of the overall messaging of Testo Junkie, as Preciado also refers to those in his community rejecting the term “gender dysphorics” and instead adopting the terms “gender pirates” or “gender hackers.”140 This terminology is expressive of freedom and the usurpation of government and regulation, with “gender

hacking”

also

being

referential

to

embracing

the

technology

of

the

“pharmacopornographic era.” He furthermore reclaims the term “transexual,” which has been historically viewed as an offensive slur. However, Preciado also uses terms indicative of being under control, whether internally or externally, writing, “[t]he human being is becoming a rodent.”141 Stephen Greer explores this by writing, “Preciado’s discourse slips [into] an account of voluntary self-intoxication [...].”142 However, Preciado’s spiral into addiction is seen as a side-effect of his project, even as he describes his continuous blood haemorrhaging,143 attributing his addictions to sex and testosterone to his love of their formlessness. Preciado further writes that “gender identity, or pleasure are beyond the ken of the possible.”144 This points towards the fluidity he longs to inhabit and the impossibility of fully externalizing his identity. This passage also illustrates Preciado’s simultaneous experience as the liberated bio-hacker and addict to

138

Jones, “The Biodrag of Genre,” p. 2.

Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 139.

140 Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 55.

141 Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 140.

142 Greer, Stephen. “Gender Drift: Testo Junkie, queer performativity and molecular becoming.” Performance Research 23, no. 7, (2018): 9.

143 Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 245.

144 Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 253.

139

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testosterone, stuck in an endless cycle of chasing “the formless.”145 Preciado’s account of form is romantic and complicated, and he paints an ever-changing self-portrait to encapsulate notions of gender revolution. His approach is unique, as he does not instruct his audience to turn away from gender medicine but rather to reappropriate and reform it through covert contemporary means. He writes, “[t]he pharmacopornographic body is not passive living matter but a techno-organic interface.”146 This is indicative of the fluidity between his gender performances, as he shifts between a legal cisgender subject and a queer medical experiment.147 He illustrates the prevalence of control in medicine, which is further analyzed through Windsor’s study on the authorization and labelling of queer identities.148 Jones and Greer explore the form and style of Preciado’s work, highlighting the recurring themes of shifting binaries, whether it be through gender, literary stylings, or Preciado’s addiction to testosterone.

As a culmination of medical and social revolution, Testo Junkie is a call to embrace ambiguity to evade normative systems of power, through repurposing its weapons of oppression.

145

Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 253.

Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 114.

147 Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 61.

148 Windsor, "Regulating Healthy Gender,” p.140.

146

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Bibliography Greer, Stephen. “Gender Drift: Testo Junkie, queer performativity and molecular becoming.”

Performance Research 23, no. 7 (2018): 63–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2018.1557450.

Jones, Sophie A. “The Biodrag of Genre in Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era.” Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics 2, no. 2 (2018). https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/3887.

Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Feminist Press, 2016.

Windsor, Elroi J., "Regulating Healthy Gender: Surgical Body Modification among Transgender and Cisgender Consumers." PhD diss., Georgia State University, 2011. https://doi.org/10.57709/1956370.